What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

Thanks for the submit! My alternative produces summaries only for directories. The original post additionally lists all files in the current directory. Sometimes the files, they just clutter up the output. Once the big directory is located, *then* worry about which file(s) are consuming so much space.

Prints the top 10 memory consuming processes (with children and instances aggregated) sorted by total RSS and calculates the percentage of total RAM each uses. Please note that since RSS can include shared libraries it is possible for the percentages to add up to more that the total amount of RAM, but this still gives you a pretty good idea. Also note that this does not work with the mawk version of awk, but it works fine with GNU Awk which is on most Linux systems. It also does not work on OS X.

If you want to relocate a package on your own, or you just want to know what those PREIN/UN and POSTIN/UN scripts will do, this will dump out all that detail simply.

You may want to expand the egrep out other verbose flags like CHANGELOGTEXT etc, as your needs require.

It isn't clear, but the formatting around $tag is important: %{$tag} just prints out the first line, while [%{$tag }] iterates thru multi-line output, joining the lines with a space (yes, there's a space between the g and } characters. To break it out for all newlines, use [%{$tag\n}] but the output will be long.

This makes an alias for a command named 'busy'. The 'busy' command opens a random file in /usr/include to a random line with vim. Drop this in your .bash_aliases and make sure that file is initialized in your .bashrc.

This function is used to sort selected lines of a text file to the end of that file. Especially useful in cases where human intervention is necessary to sort out parts of a file. Let's say that you have a text file which contains the words

rough

slimy

red

fluff

dough

For whatever reason, you want to sort all words rhyming with 'tough' to the bottom of the file, and all words denoting colors to the top, while keeping the order of the rest of the file intact.

'$EDITOR' will open, showing all of the lines in the given file, numbered with '0' padding. Adding a '~' to the beginning of the line will cause the line to sort to the end of the file, adding '!' will cause it to sort to the beginning.

This command loops over all of the processes in a system and creates an associative array in awk with the process name as the key and the sum of the RSS as the value. The associative array has the effect of summing a parent process and all of it's children. It then prints the top ten processes sorted by size.